LOSTCIRCUITS

3D Effects in Games

In 3D games, the stereo effect is present, however, the overall impression is that depth perception is less pronounced compared to the sensation provided by the stereo photographs. Most of the lack of 3D effect has to be lamed on the game coding, that is, we cannot blame game developers to rely more on perspective and occlusion cues than real depth perception since almost every user, up to now, uses a standard 2D display. The spread of z-plane as shown by the Elsa Control tab turned out to correlate almost exactly with the transparancy and depth of the display.

There are several games with excellent 3D effects, though. Some others like Mercedes Benz Truck Racing fared rather poorly, as did Expendable and most of the older games like Incoming. Excellent 3D view was surprisingly achieved in Final Reality (with the caveat that the different scenes required different adjustments), 3D Mark2000 and some others. The three clear winners, however were Quake3 Arena with superb depth resolution followed by Serious Sam and Unreal Tournament.

Another really cool application was BreakAway3D, a funky 3D version of the old Arkanoid game (thanks, Christian, for slipping me your Demo-CD!!). This game runs pretty cool on any monitor but in 3D, it kind of sucks you in.

Other Applications

Gaming aside, after seeing the DTI3D display, it is hard, not to predict that within the next few years, this is where the market will be moving. Currently, there are 3D websites, in the future, 3D effects in games will become better, that is, if the developers finally catch on, and there will be more and more 3D virtual tours, Real Estate is just one application for what is coming up. 3D shopping catalogues, pornography (sorry to mention it here but after all this is a major business) and CAD applications are, as of present, limited by the 2-dimensionality of the current genre of display. Another major area of interest is research and development, particularly in the biomedical and molecular biological field. Almost every single issue of Nature, Science and PNAS (the three most prestigious publications in the world except for the Inquirer) has featured stereo images of molecular structures yielding the most important information regarding physiological and biochemical actions of new drugs on a variety of diseases. In addition, a substantial amount of teaching material (gross anatomy just to mention one) is made available in 3D format. To spin this idea a bit further, instead of calling in specialists who waste a lot of time traveling, operation room (OR) assistance is available via video conferencing, the same holds for automotive repair and these are just a few of the numerous applications where any kind of 3D glasses would pose handicaps that could decide over live or death.

What if I don't want to view interlaced 3D?

In case 3D viewing is turned on, the display uses column interleaving and, thus, the 2D quality is pretty horrible. However, a simple push of the menu button on the display front panel instantly switches the display back to non-interleaved mode and provides excellent 2D quality.

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